1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to goods distribution or delivery and more specifically relates to a method and system for tracking time sensitive items. Still more specifically, the invention relates to identification of shopping carts containing perishable goods abandoned in a grocery store.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are several categories of products within a grocery store that are considered time sensitive: frozen foods, refrigerated items such as meat and dairy products, and produce. Time sensitive items are perishable items. Grocers can anticipate that a certain amount of spoilage of these products will occur naturally, but spoilage occurs more rapidly when the items are taken off the shelf, placed in a cart, and then left in the aisle at room temperature if the customer decides to abandon the cart.
Most modern retail stores use point of sale (POS) systems for providing customers with better, faster service. A point of sale system may generally have one or more automated check-out terminals and on cart mobile barcode scanners, which are capable of sensing and interpreting the bar code, printed on each item of merchandise to be checked out.
A barcode is a machine-readable representation of information in a visual format on a surface. Originally barcodes stored data in the widths and spacings of printed parallel lines, but today they also come in patterns of dots, concentric circles, and hidden in images. Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode scanners. A barcode scanner is a computer peripheral for reading barcodes printed on various surfaces. A barcode scanner generally consists of a light source, a lens, and a photo conductor translating optical impulses into electrical ones. Additionally, nearly all barcode scanners currently produced contain decoder circuitry analyzing the barcode's image data provided by the photo conductor and sending the barcode's content to the output port of the scanner.
Contained in the bar code is the item's Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) code. Each of the check-out terminals and mobile scanners is connected to a computer network, which processes the SKU information. The network computer's database is called the inventory control database. The inventory control database includes a list of items of merchandise in the store, a SKU for each of these items, and various types of information, including pricing and inventory information, associated with each SKU. When a customer is ready to make a purchase, store personnel or the customer simply uses a barcode scanner to sense the bar code on each of the customer's selections. The computer interprets the SKU contained in the bar code, looks up the price for each item, keeps a running total of the purchase, and communicates with the inventory control system. A container, as used herein, is a shopping cart, a delivery truck, a restaurant salad bar or any receptacle that holds time sensitive items.
An inventory control system is an integrated package of software and hardware used in warehouse operations, retail stores and elsewhere, to monitor the quantity, location and status of inventory. Inventory control systems may also refer to just the software components. Modern inventory control systems rely upon barcodes, and, optionally, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, to provide automatic identification of inventory objects. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is a small object that can be attached to or incorporated into a product, a shopping cart, or a mobile barcode scanner. RFID tags contain silicon chips and antennas to enable them to receive and respond to radio-frequency queries from an RFID transceiver.
Real time inventory control systems use wireless, mobile terminals to record inventory transactions at the moment they occur. A wireless LAN transmits the transaction information to an inventory control database.
One type of real time inventory control system is a shopping cart based personal shopping system. The electronic personal shopping system includes a mobile terminal, which may be either hand-held or mounted on a shopping cart. The mobile terminal is a microprocessor controlled unit and includes a portable scanner configured to read bar code information directly from items being considered for purchase. The mobile terminal is further configured to communicate with a store network computer by means of an individually addressable radio frequency communication transceiver. Processed information is displayed to the customer on an LCD display panel. The mobile terminal further includes a reader/writer unit for interfacing with a customer ID card and a memory for storing data received either from the store network computer, the customer ID card, or both. The customer scans their item and places it in a bag inside their cart. The item identification SKU that is read by the barcode scanner is linked to the real time inventory control system on the store network computer. The SKU number relates the item's product description and cost as well as other information.